I'm a theater lover. I am happiest when I am sitting in a theater. Or talking about theater. Or reading about theater. Or now blogging about it. If you’re reading this, you're probably a theater lover too and I hope you’ll keep me company as I blog my way through each Broadway season.

June 9, 2018

Guest Blogger: My Buddy Bill Recalls His Days as One of "The Boys in the Band" and Assesses The Play's Starry Broadway Revival

A note from Jan: Two people can see the same show and walk
away with different feelings about it. My theatergoing buddy Bill and I just saw
the new production of The Boys in the Band that marks the show's much-delayed
Broadway debut. I thoroughly enjoyed it, particularly Zachary Quinto's
performance. Bill liked the show a little less and Quinto a lot less. But I'm turning this week's post over to Bill
because he has a personal history with the show that makes his thoughts about
it far more interesting than mine:

Though I've never met Mart Crowley, whose 50-year-old
hit The Boys in the Band is
just now making its Broadway debut, I've always wanted to thank him. Thank him
partly because in 1968 the then-new play was groundbreaking in its onstage
depiction of gay men's lives. Thank him even more because when I acted in a
production of it nearly 49 ago, the show's lead role was played by the man who
would become my life partner, until his death.

George and I met on Nov. 10, 1969, the first day of
rehearsal for a production of Boys that
was to play Miami's Coconut Grove Playhouse. It would be one of the first
productions of the play performed outside of New York City, where the original
was still playing (that's a photo from our production above).

The now defunct Coconut Grove was one of three Florida
playhouses that were part of a "winter stock" circuit. The other two
were Ft. Lauderdale’s Parker Playhouse and the Royal Poinciana, in Palm Beach.
Every year, star-driven plays were performed at all three theaters.
I mention this only because it was a sign of those times that the Parker and
the Royal Poinciana declined to take our Boys. Their managements, we were told, were afraid of their
patrons' reactions, given what was then considered too-controversial
material—not only homosexuality but plentiful profanity. Audiences, the two
theaters feared, would protest. Or worse, they wouldn't show up.

How wrong they were. Our run at the Coconut Grove, a mere
three weeks, was virtually SRO.

When Jan asked me to a performance of this Broadway Boys, whose limited run ends Aug.
11, I was curious: Would the play—whose original production opened off-Broadway
on April 14, 1968, to wild acclaim and celebrity-filled audiences (Rudolf
Nureyev, Jackie Kennedy, Groucho Marx, etc.) and ran for more than 1,000 performances—still work after 50 years? Would it still be both funny and
moving? Was it even relevant now, given the societal gains of the LGBT
community since its debut? And how would today’s audiences receive it,
considering that in recent years the play has often been the subject of
complaints that Crowley's characters (based on people he knew) are depicted in
ways that are either offensive or unrealistic—or both?

The setup of Boys is
simple enough. In his lavish New York City apartment, Michael, an angsty
30-year-old gay man who lives above his means, throws a small birthday party
for his best friend, Harold. Though the four invited guests are Harold's
friends, Michael knows them too. The play’s nine-member cast is filled out by
three other men—Michael's close friend Donald, also gay, who comes into the
city once a week to see his psychiatrist; a gay hustler, a gift for Harold from
one of the guests; and Alan, Michael's former college roommate, who early in
the play phones Michael, apparently in such distress that Michael reluctantly
invites him to come over for what he hopes will be a quick therapeutic talk.
Alan, a married man with children, is presumed by Michael to be straight.

Alan's arrival, though, and his eventual physical attack on
the flamboyant Emory, turns the party into a debacle. What's more, the
sexuality of Alan himself comes into question: Is he in distress because he has
come to realize he's gay? Crowley's play leaves the question tantalizingly
unanswered.

This 50th anniversary production of Boys has been neatly cut down from
two acts to one by Crowley and the show’s expert, openly gay director Joe
Mantello, whose production of Wicked is
still running on Broadway after nearly 15 years and whose revival of Edward
Albee's Three Tall Women,
starring the veteran Glenda Jackson, is a current Broadway hit (click here to read more about him).

Even more significantly, the play boasts that its cast are
all "out" gay men, three of them nationally known: Jim Parsons (from
TV's "The Big Bang Theory"), who plays Michael; Matt Bomer (TV's
"White Collar," the "Magic Mike" movies"), as
Donald; and Zachary Quinto (Spock in the revived "Star Trek" movie
franchise), as birthday-boy Harold (click here to read more about the casting).

While these high-profile stars are no doubt the reason for
all the attention the production has gotten, their casting is only partially
successful. Bomer is solidly ear- and eye-pleasing, playing Donald simply and
sincerely while getting all his laughs. Quinto is less successful: Though
extraordinarily fine in previous New York stage appearances (revivals of Angels in America and The Glass Menagerie), he wears his showy
character like a suit of clothes rather than inhabiting him.

Most disappointing is Parsons’ Michael. Early in Boys we
learn that he has been sober for five weeks. After Alan's attack on Emory,
though, Michael loses it: He starts drinking again, giving in to his darker,
uglier side. Up to this point, Parsons’ comic performance has been nearly
impeccable. But now, in the play’s more somber second half, he fails to command
the stage, as the character must.

Nor does he fully summon up either the
ferocious anger or inhumanity Michael should display towards his guests as they
play a humiliating game he forces on them all. Finally, and perhaps fatally for
the play, Parsons insufficiently embodies Michael’s regret and self-hatred,
when at the play’s climax he breaks down in an aria of regret and anguish. What
comes out of Parsons is not a torrent of emotion but a mere rivulet.

We are thus denied the catharsis that a first-rate
production of Boys can
provide.

A few years ago, the acclaimed playwright and gay rights
activist Larry Kramer, a longtime friend of both George’s and mine, belatedly
asked how we two had met. When I told him that it was in a production of The Boys in the Band, his response was
instant: “That was an important play." I have no doubt that it still is.
It presents us with a vivid picture of what life was like for some (though by
no means all) gay men some 50 years ago, even as we can now ponder how much
life for such gay men has changed in the last half century.

But though I believe that the play itself holds up, this
production doesn’t quite make it for me. While the boys are funny as ever,
the tragedy of this band is too much missing.